Important versus vital records: The small percentage with a big impact

Executive Summary

Although they number just a few percent of an organisation’s total record population, vital records and how you care for them can have a big impact on your business. These records require special preservation measures—ones that aren’t found in ordinary on- and offsite storage facilities. Whether a legal document, photograph, customer record, X-ray, blueprint, patent, corporate article, or one of-a-kind object, when it comes to vital records, storage is the single most important factor in determining their useful life.

How do you identify what records are vital to your organisation? What measures should you take to ensure their long-term protection? How does the material of which a record is made influence its longevity—and guide your choice of storage solution?

The question remains: Have you done enough to preserve your organisation’s vital and irreplaceable five percent? This white paper will help you define what your vital records are, understand the risks associated with inadequate preservation, evaluate storage options, and implement an effective vital records programme for your organisation.

Introduction

Protection of vital records may be the least understood— or the least appreciated—area of records management. If you’re reading this white paper, chances are you already know a great deal about managing records. Certainly, this discipline has never been more critical, particularly in light of legislative and compliance requirements, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002; the GrammLeach-Bliley Act (GLBA), also known as the Financial Services Modernisation Act of 1999; the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA); and the growing body of state and local mandates designed to protect information. In addition, new laws have increased the cost and risk associated with legal discovery processes—a particularly worrisome area in today’s litigious world.

And chances are you have devoted significant resources and effort to improving your records management strategy and procedures. But have you done enough?

One area of vulnerability for many organisations is ensuring the accessibility of records. Comprising just five percent of an organisation’s total record population, vital records are critical to enterprise operations. They may contain information needed to ensure business continuity during or shortly after a crisis, for example. Or they may document legal or financial status and preserve the rights of an organisation’s stakeholders. If vital records are managed properly, your organisation is protected. If they aren’t, you’re exposed to risks such as noncompliance, loss of asset value, and high costs associated with restoration and duplication.

“Vital” has a unique meaning when it comes to records. For example, your current checking account balance is a critical piece of information, but it’s dynamic and doesn’t need to be preserved for extended time periods. Therefore, it is not a vital record. Longevity is the fundamental differentiator between vital records and all others. Vital records have enduring value that must be preserved for years or even centuries. Storing them in a box on a shelf somewhere is simply not enough. The preservation process must ensure that vital records remain secure, accessible, and usable over these extreme time frames.

Vital records contain information organisations need to continue operations during or shortly after a crisis. Some document legal and financial status, such as contracts, patents, deeds, X-rays, laboratory notebooks, and blueprints. Others preserve the rights of stakeholders. Still others are one-of-a-kind items with historical significance. Vital records are often physical records, such as paper or film. And, as detailed in the following section, every organisation has a uniquely defined set of vital records.

Examples Of Vital Records

• Contracts
• Patents and intellectual property
• Leases
• Policy manuals
• Articles of incorporation
• Quality Assurance (QA) records
• Blueprints
• Drawings
• Maps
• Customer records
• Corporate papers
• Laboratory notebooks
• Policy or procedure manuals
• Deeds
• Audiotapes
• Videotapes
• Photographs and slides
• X-rays
• Advertisements
• Titles
• Cultural artifacts

Remember, what’s vital for one organisation may not be for another. Use your organisation’s mission as a guide for determining which records are truly vital.

Your Vital Records

Identifying records that are truly vital is the first step in the preservation process– and that determination will differ from organisation to organisation.

Start with your organisation’s mission and use that to guide the process of defining what is vital.

When approaching the process of defining vital records, it’s best to start with your organisation’s mission and use that as a guide. After all, you cannot afford to collect, label, and treat everything as vital; you must place your limited preservation resources where they are most needed. So it’s incredibly important to think about the elements that define and embody that mission—and which records will therefore require long-term preservation. Ask yourself the following:

• What’s important to carry forward for the historical record? What do you want the future to know about your organisation?
• What legal or regulatory requirements govern your organisation, and what records must be retained to comply?
• Will your organisation be able to reuse or repurpose items in the future?
• What records must be preserved to protect the rights of employees, customers, and shareholders?
• What needs to be preserved to ensure the continuity of business operations?
• What would the consequences be if certain classes of records were lost? What would your organisation be unable to do without them? Could normal functions take place?
• Can the records be replaced or reconstructed? At what cost?

Experience shows that if you don’t take this top-down approach, beginning with examining the mission, you’re at a distinct disadvantage—with little basis upon which to determine what’s important and how to create a plan.

How vital record preservation impacts organisational risk

Once you’ve done the difficult work of thinking through your organisation’s mission and using that to define which records are vital, tactical decisions about how to protect them are much more straightforward. Your focus should be on minimising and avoiding the risks associated with inadequate protection of vital records. And the key here is preserving access to, and usability of, your vital records.

Without proper preservation, records degrade over time and may be lost forever. The impact on your organisation can be severe. Consider the following risks:

• Loss of use, including the inability to produce a vital record during litigation or the ability to reuse/ repurpose the record to bring additional revenues into the organisation.
• Costs associated with the outright loss or recovery/ repair of improperly stored records. Paper may turn brittle and yellow, photographic images may fade, and film-based dyes can fade, become distorted, and shrink from “vinegar syndrome.” There’s no time to waste; materials are degrading while you are putting a plan in place. Costs associated with these types of losses will depend on the seriousness (or extent) of the damage
• Damage to corporate reputation, particularly in cases where shareholders have a reasonable expectation that records should have received the highest levels of protection and security.
• Negative impact on business continuance where inadequate analysis has been done to identify the probability of damage or loss of information and its impact on the business.
• Inability to comply with federal, state, local, and international regulations and mandates, including GDPR, SOX, GLBA, and HIPAA, and the increased corporate and personal liability associated with such failures.
• Increased exposure during litigation due to the inability to produce requested documentation throughout the discovery process.